Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nattu/3945439186/
Speaker: Michael Jakob
Description
The guiding research question of this activity is how market failures and collective action challenges related to mitigation can be addressed by international and domestic climate policies. These include emission trading systems, carbon taxes, technology funds, and technology subsidies and quotas. We produce conceptual and applied policy analyses of these policies in view of their impacts on environmental effectiveness, cost effectiveness, distributional consequences, political feasibility, and robustness under uncertainty.
Particular – but not exclusive – focus is on policy configurations to implement ambitious mitigation objectives such as the 2°C objective. Another priority is game theoretic analysis of international climate policy. Against the background of the significant collective action challenges of providing public goods related to mitigation, we investigate policy options to enhance international cooperation and welfare.
If climate policy instruments are implemented in the context of multiple market failures and government limitations that cannot be easily removed, e.g. imperfect appropriation of technological innovation, market power, or limited institutional capacities, this needs to be taken into account to avoid inefficiencies. Therefore, another focus of our analyses is the assessment of climate policy instruments under second best conditions.
Methods
Methods include computer-based numerical modeling with the models MICA and PRIDE, microeconomic formal analysis, econometric and statistical data analysis, and qualitative policy analysis.
Products
- Analysis of options to enhance climate policy cooperation at the international and sub-national level
- Assessment of climate policy instruments, in particular under second best settings.
